With the rise of online sales, more and more retailers are striving to meet shifting customer expectations. Consider that 45% of consumers have abandoned a basket on a retailer’s website because of unsatisfactory or limited delivery options, according to a MetaPack survey.

No wonder retailers are shaking up their distribution networks and looking for more options.

The world of e-commerce is about to change completely. The United States has indicated intent to withdraw from the Universal Postal Union due to the way the global inter-economy postal tariffs work. These have distorted postal rates so it is cheaper today to ship from China to parts of the US, than within the US itself. This is about to change now, and will redefine competition and competitiveness in e-commerce.

There’s no question that the supply chain is a strategic asset for forward-thinking retailers and brand owners. Getting products from A to Z efficiently while maintaining a positive customer experience is a big balancing act that supply chain leaders deal with every day. So, how can your supply chain have an impact on customer satisfaction levels? How do successful companies view their supply chains and why is it worth investing in them? While the path to success may not be obvious, some recent research gives us some clues.

The volume of data that companies have available to them today has never been greater, but jumping from system to system and combing through it all is easier said than done. To combat demand volatility and successfully anticipate developing events that might impact your business, you need to establish a comprehensive overview of an increasingly complicated network of systems and partners.

Establishing maximum efficiency in your supply chain is vital in today’s customer-centric climate. The average consumer is only willing to wait a maximum of 4.5 days for delivery, down from 5.5 days in 2012, according to AlixPartners research. People spend time online researching products and identifying the best prices, but when they order, they expect things to arrive quickly, and to have visibility into its delivery status every step of the way.

Supply chain networks are the future and we’re not the only ones speaking about it. Multi-Enterprise Business Networks are becoming a hot topic for analyst firms such as Gartner and many solutions are touting their network of partners and suppliers.

Agility has been a huge focus for organizations as we enter unpredictable waters of the current and future economy. Increasing customer expectations, global business challenges and digitization are greatly impacting how we market and sell our products and provide a high level customer experience through the supply chain. And agility is critical to sustained business success.

The definition of Supply chain visibility has evolved more than any other term in supply chain. From track and trace to multi-tier inventory, supply chain visibility is used to describe improvements in how we use data to track and make better decisions in our supply chain.

Today, we would like to talk about end-to-end supply chain visibility and how organizations are using supply chain orchestration in order to get real-time actionable visibility into the orders that are being executed throughout their end-to-end supply chains. This is key.

Last week, MPO and DSV co-presented on the webinar, "15 Critical Functions of Supply Chain Control Towers". As with every webinar we do we receive a whole host of insightful questions from the audience, many of which we answer on the webinar and the rest which we want to answer via our blog.

Here are the questions from the webinar and answers from our team of experts.

Digitization has changed everything. It’s changed not only how we interact but how we make decisions with readily available information. This accessibility to information and organizations has flattened the playing field for every organization as they look to market and sell their wares.

Supply chain networks and our ability to collaborate across them is becoming a critical core competency for successful supply chain operations. With more external parties and partners involved in helping us to deliver a positive customer experience through the supply chain, it’s critical that we evolve how we think about these parties, their impact on business success and how we consistently improve collaboration across them.

I was recently reading Adrian Gonzalez’s 2018 supply chain predictions on his Talking Logistics blog and I found myself nodding at many of his points. We live in a chaotic world where change is the only constant to our lives and we’re seeing that with the massive changes in business and the economy. Changes that will require a different approach to how we measure, connect and execute our supply chains.

Supply chain visibility is a critical function of any modern (and competitively advantageous) supply chain. However, the term itself leads many leaders to focus just on the capture and display of supply chain data.